Sunday, 1 June 2014

Because last month was poetry month.

W. H. Auden, Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
Soul and body have no bounds:
To lovers as they lie upon
Her tolerant enchanted slope
In their ordinary swoon,
Grave the vision Venus sends
Of supernatural sympathy,
Universal love and hope;
While an abstract insight wakes
Among the glaciers and the rocks
The hermit’s sensual ecstasy.
Certainty, fidelity
On the stroke of midnight pass
Like vibrations of a bell,
And fashionable madmen raise
Their pedantic boring cry:
Every farthing of the cost,
All the dreadful cards foretell,
Shall be paid, but not from this night
Not a whisper, not a thought,
Not a kiss nor look be lost.
Beauty, midnight, vision dies:
Let the winds of dawn that blow
Softly round your dreaming head
Such a day of sweetness show
Eye and knocking heart may bless.
Find the mortal world enough;
Noons of dryness see you fed
By the involuntary powers,
Nights of insult let you pass
Watched by every human love.

3 comments:

I don't know how Auden does it, but he makes every single line so huge, so heavy with import. And he makes his second stanzas so melodic that you almost forget that he is beating you over the head with imagery that no one else in the world could conjure.

I love Auden and his heavy darkness. I love his Irish melancholy. And I wish--desperately--that Vincent Price were alive to read all of Auden's poems aloud.

I am off to read "Funeral Blues" again. And to remind myself that if we do not revive the beauty of this English language, it will continue its decline.

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About Me

I've been a teacher, a politician, an administrator, worked in advertising, made maple syrup, run a home based graphics business, brought up two kids, stayed married and read a lot of books. I seem to end up on a lot of not-for-profit boards. I'm a scuba diver, a line dancer (when my knee isn't complaining too loudly) and a writer, sort of. I've been playing with computers since about 1985 and I still don't understand either their hardware or my husband's wetware. And I measure out at least some of my life in coffee mugs.